MythBusters Bust House

ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that the MythBusters accidentally sent a cannon ball hurtling through Dublin this afternoon, punching through a home, bouncing across a six-lane road, and ultimately coming to a rest inside a now-demolished Toyota minivan. Amazingly, there were no injuries. The ball was fired from a home-made cannon at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb range, and was intended to strike a water target. Instead the ball missed the water, punched through a cinder-block wall, and skipped off the hill behind. Prior to today, the MythBusters had been shooting episodes at the bomb range for over seven years without major incident. It is not clear whether Savage/Hyneman or Belleci/Imahara/Byron were conducting the experiment."

Comments

Funny Stuff

[methano]

So the cannon ball flies through the neighborhood at 4:15 PM when all the kids are coming home from school and tears through a house where the parents and kids are sleeping.

So why are they sleeping in the middle of the afternoon?

Just curious.

Re:Funny Stuff

[delinear]

When you say it like that... maybe we need another episode of Mythbusters to test the journey of the canonball in this episode.

Re:Up stairs and through walls

[Shirogitsune]

Slather it with enough lard and you don't have to worry so much about friction. ;)

Re:Adam was quoted as

[elrous0]

I'm pretty sure Discovery will cover it, and probably give them a substantial bonus and invite them to participate in the episode to boot.

Re:Intercontinental!

[Lev13than]

What's the shortest distance between any two continents, anywhere in the world?

If you exclude continents that are actually touching, then the Europe and Africa across the Straits of Gibralter. The gap is only 14.3km at it's narrowest, so transcontinental artillery is easily achievable (105mm howitzers have a range well in excess of 15km, and larger artillery can go much, much further). Of course, a traditional cannonball maxes out at a few hundred yards so setting up the Mythbusters experiment in Morocco would have merely been a hazard to shipping, not buildings.

Re:Not to be too pedantic

[Ihmhi]

I don't remember which battle it was (still nursing my morning coffee), but I recall the British navy shelling an American fort in a similar situation. There was a large hill in the way and they couldn't fire directly on the fort, so they tried "skipping" cannonballs off of a hill. It worked - the cannonballs bounced off of the hill and went up and over.

I remember at least the "cannon = hill = sky high flying cannonball" part and I learned this in high school (at the latest). It kinda surprises me that no one on the entire crew (the performers or the technical folks) made this logical leap and thought "Hey, that hill there... you don't think it could...?"

Re:Footage

[Jason Levine]

Probably not as they expected it to just impact with the water containers. Still, the path it took was quite impressive. From the article:

The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m., authorities said.

There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all - only awakening because of plaster dust.

The ball wasn't done bouncing.

It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family's beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive.

Out of the cannon, through the cinder-block wall, off the hillside, flies 700 yards, bursts through a front door, races up the stairs, through a bedroom, exiting the house, across a six lane highway, off a roof and slams into a Toyota Sienna. Wow.

Nobody hurt, good

[Peter Simpson]

Now the tone can be set by Mythbusters' actions. The right thing to do, is first, to repair the damage. Not pay for it, not file an insurance claim, but send a first class home repair crew over to make the house better than it was before. Deliver a better minivan to their driveway tonight. Next, in person apologies (and a night out or free passes to a Mythbusters shoot, their choice) by those involved, and Adam and Jamie. Explain carefully what your plans are to prevent anything like this from ever happening again. Do it fast, do it right and you come out looking good. Get the lawyers and insurance companies involved and ask the family to sign settlements and it all goes to heck in a handbasket.

Re:Not to be too pedantic

[modecx]

What people get arrested for is negligence. Accidents, not so much.

If you're driving drunk and you get in a wreck, you were not involved in an accident because you were not exercising a standard of care that the law requires; namely, not driving whilst intoxicated. If you're texting and run over a class full of kindergartners crossing the street to the park, same thing. If you're excessively speeding and wreck, ditto. None of these are accidents, because accidents are by definition unforeseen, and most often, unpreventable.

Hitting a deer might be an accident. Colliding with a motorcycle rider who was stupidly riding in your blind spot might be an accident. A truck driver having a heart attack, dying at the wheel and dumping the toxic contents of his truck into a pristine mountain river is an accident.

Accidents usually involve some amount of civil liability, even if people are maimed or killed. Negligence involves criminal liability. Two different things. Y'all need to stop using 'accident' incorrectly. I once again propose a new word: neglident.